Debunking conspiracy theorists

Astute observers of history are aware that for every notable event
there will usually be at least one, often several, wild conspiracy
theories which spring up around it. “The CIA killed Hendrix,” “The
Pope had John Lennon murdered,” “Hitler was half werewolf,” “Space
aliens replaced Nixon with a clone,” etc, etc. The bigger the event,
the more ridiculous and more numerous are the fanciful rantings
which circulate in relation to it.

So its hardly surprising that the events of Sept 11 2001 have spawned
their fair share of these ludicrous fairy tales. And as always,
there is—sadly—a small but gullible percentage of the population
eager to lap up these tall tales, regardless of facts or rational
analysis.

One of the wilder stories circulating about Sept 11, and one that
has attracted something of a cult following amongst conspiracy buffs
is that it was carried out by 19 fanatical Arab hijackers,
masterminded by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, with no apparent
motivation other than that they “hate our freedoms.”

Never a group of people to be bothered by facts, the perpetrators of
this cartoon fantasy have constructed an elaborately woven web of
delusions and unsubstantiated hearsay in order to promote this garbage
across the internet and the media to the extent that a number of
otherwise rational people have actually fallen under its spell.

Normally I don’t even bother debunking this kind of junk, but
the effect that this paranoid myth is beginning to have requires a
little rational analysis, in order to consign it to the same rubbish
bin as all such silly conspiracy theories.

These crackpots even contend that the extremist Bush regime was caught
unawares by the attacks, had no hand in organizing them, and actually
would have stopped them if it had been able. Blindly ignoring the
stand down of the US air-force, the insider trading on airline
stocks—linked to the CIA, the complicit behavior of Bush on the
morning of the attacks, the controlled demolition of the WTC, the
firing of a missile into the Pentagon and a host of other documented
proofs that the Bush regime was behind the attacks, the conspiracy
theorists stick doggedly to a silly story about 19 Arab hijackers
somehow managing to commandeer 4 planes simultaneously and fly them
around US airspace for nearly 2 hours ,crashing them into important
buildings, without the US intelligence services having any idea that
it was coming, and without the Air Force knowing what to do.

The huge difficulties with such a stupid story force them to invent
even more preposturous stories to distract from its core silliness,
and thus the tale has escalated into a mythic fantasy of truly
gargantuan proportions.

It’s difficult to apply rational analysis to such unmitigated
stupidity, but that is the task which I take on in this article.
However, it should be noted that one of the curious characteristics of
conspiracy theorists is that they effortlessly change their so called
evidence in response to each aspect which is debunked. As soon as one
delusion is unmasked, they simply invent another to replace it, and
deny that the first ever existed.

Eventually, when they have turned full circle through this endlessly
changing fantasy fog , they then re-invent the original delusion and
deny that you ever debunked it, thus beginning the circle once
more. This technique is known as “the fruit loop” and saves the
conspiracy theorist from ever having to see any of their ideas through
to their (ill)logical conclusions.

According to the practitioners of the fruit loop, 19 Arabs took over
the 4 planes by subduing the passengers and crew through the use of
guns,knives,box cutters and gas, and then used electronic guidance
systems which they had smuggled on board to fly the planes to their
targets.

The suspension of disbelief required for this outrageous concoction is
only for the hard core conspiracy theorist. For a start, they
conveniently skip over the awkward fact that there weren’t any
Arabs on the planes. If there were, one must speculate that they
somehow got on board without being filmed by any of the security
cameras and without being registered on the passenger lists. But the
curly question of how they are supposed to have got on board is all
too mundane for the exciting world of the conspiracy theorist.

With vague mumblings that they must have been using false ID ( but
never specifying which IDs they are alleged to have used, or how these
were traced to their real identities), they quickly bypass this
problem, to relate exciting and sinister tales about how some of the
fictitious fiends were actually searched before boarding because they
looked suspicious.

However, as inevitably happens with any web of lies, this simply
paints them into an even more difficult corner. How are they supposed
to have got on board with all that stuff if they were searched ? And
if they used gas in a confined space, they would have been affected
themselves unless they also had masks in their luggage.

“Excuse me sir, why do you have a boxcutter, a gun, a container of
gas, a gas mask and an electronic guidance unit in your luggage?”

“A present for your grandmother? Very well sir, on you get.”

“Very strange”, thinks the security officer. “That’s the
fourth Arabic man without an Arabic name who just got on board with a
knife, gun or boxcutter and gas mask. And why does that security
camera keep flicking off every time one these characters shows up?
Must be one of those days I guess...”

Asking any of these basic questions to a conspiracy theorist is likely
to cause a sudden leap to the claim that we know that they were on
board because they left a credit card trail for the tickets they had
purchased and cars they had rented. So if they used credit cards that
identified them, how does that reconcile with the claim that they used
false IDs to get on to the plane? But by this time ,the fruit loop is
in full swing, as the conspiracy theorist tries to stay one jump ahead
of this annoying and awkward rational analysis.They will allege that
the hijackers’ passports were found at the crash scenes. “So
there!” they exalt triumphantly, their fanatical faces lighting up
with that deranged look of one who has just a revelation of
questionable sanity.

Hmm? So they got on board with false IDs but took their real passports
with them? However, by this time the fruit loop has been completely
circumnavigated,and the conspiracy theorist exclaims impatiently,
“Who said anything about false IDs? We know what seats they were
sitting in! Their presence is well documented!” And so the whole
loop starts again. “Well, why aren’t they on the passenger
lists?”

“You numbskull! They assumed the identities of other passengers!”
And so on...

Finally, out of sheer fascination with this circular method of
creative delusion , the rational sceptic will allow them to get away
with this loop, in order to move on to the next question, and see what
further delights await us in the unraveling of this marvelously stupid
story.

“Uh, how come their passports survived fiery crashes that completely
incinerated the planes and all the passengers?” The answer of
course is that its just one of those strange co-incidences, those
little quirks of fate that do happen from time to time. You know, like
the same person winning the lottery four weeks in a row. The odds are
astronomical, but these things do happen...

This is another favourite deductive method of the conspiracy theorist.

The “improbability drive,” in which they decide upon a conclusion
without any evidence whatsoever to support it, and then continually
speculate a series of wildly improbable events and unbelievable
co-incidences to support it, shrugging off the implausibility of each
event with the vague assertion that sometimes the impossible happens
(just about all the time in their world).

There is a principle called “Occam’s razor” which suggests
that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest
explanation is most likely to be correct. Conspiracy theorists hate
Occam’s razor.

Having for the sake of amusement, allowed them to get away with with
the silly story of the 19 invisible Arabs, we move on to the question
of how they are supposed to have taken over the planes.

Hijacking a plane is not an easy thing to do. Hijacking it without the
pilot being able to alert ground control is near impossible. The
pilot has only to punch in a four digit code to alert ground control
to a hijacking.

Unconcerned with the awkward question of plausibility, the conspiracy
buffs maintain that on that Sept 11, the invisible hijackers took over
the plane by the rather crude method of threatening people with
boxcutters and knives, and spraying gas (after they had attached their
masks, obviously), but somehow took control of the plane without the
crew first getting a chance to punch in the hijacking code. Not just
on one plane, but on all four. At this point in the tale, the
conspiracy theorist is again forced to call upon the services of the
improbability drive.

So now that our incredibly lucky hijackers have taken control of the
planes, all four pilots fly them with breath taking skill and
certainty to their fiery end, all four pilots unflinching in their
steely resolve for a swift meeting with Allah. Apart from their
psychotic hatred of “our freedoms” , it was their fanatical
devotion to Islam which enabled them to summon up the iron will to do
this. Which is strange, because according to another piece of hearsay
peddled by the conspiracy buffs, these guys actually went out drinking
and womanizing the night before their great martyrdom, even leaving
their Korans in the bar -really impeccable Islamic behavior—and
then got up at 5am the next morning to pull off the greatest covert
operation in history. This also requires us to believe that they were
even clear headed enough to learn how to fly the huge planes by
reading flight manuals in Arabic in the car on the way to the
airport. We know this because they supposedly left the flight manuals
there for us to find.

It gets better. Their practical training had allegedly been limited to
Cessnas and flight simulators, but this was no barrier to the
unflinching certainty with which they took over the planes and
skillfully guided them to their doom. If they are supposed to have
done their flight training with these tools, which would be available
just about anywhere in the world, its not clear why they would have
decided to risk blowing their cover to US intelligence services by
doing the training in Florida, rather than somewhere in the Middle
East, but such reasoning is foreign to the foggy world of the
conspiracy theorist , too trapped in the constant rotation of the
mental fruit loop to make their unsubstantiated fabrications seem even
semi-believable.

Having triumphantly established a circular delusion in support of the
mythical Arabs, the conspiracy theorist now confronts the difficult
question of why there’s nothing left of the planes. Anybody who
has seen the endlessly replayed footage of the second plane going into
the WTC will realize that the plane was packed with explosives. Planes
do not and cannot blow up into nothing in that manner when they crash.

Did the mythical Arabs also haul a huge heap of explosives on board,
and mange to deploy them in such a manner that they went off in the
exact instant of the crash, completely vapourizing the plane? This is
a little difficult even for the conspiracy theorist, who at this point
decides that its easier to invent new laws of physics in order to keep
the delusion rolling along.

There weren’t any explosives. It wasn’t an inside job. The
plane blew up into nothing from its exploding fuel load! Remarkable!
Sluggishly combustible jet fuel which is basically kerosine,and which
burns at a maximum temperature of around 800 C has suddenly taken on
the qualities of a ferociously explosive demolition agent, vapourizing
65 tons of aircraft into a puff of smoke. Never mind that a plane of
that size contains around 15 tons of steel and titanium, of which even
the melting points are about double that of the maximum combustion
temperature of kerosine—let alone the boiling point—which
is what would be required to vapourize a plane.

And then there’s about 50 tons of aluminium to be accounted for.
In excess of 15lbs of metal for each gallon of kerosine.

For the conspiracy theorist, such inconvenient facts are vaguely
dismissed as “mumbo jumbo”. This convenient little phrase is
their answer to just about anything factual or logical. Like a
conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat, they suddenly become
fanatically insistent about the devastating explosive qualities of
kerosine, something hitherto completely unknown to science, but just
discovered by them, this very minute. Blissfully ignoring the fact
that never before or since in aviation history has a plane vapourized
into nothing from an exploding fuel load, the conspiracy theorist
relies upon Hollywood images, where the effects are are always larger
than life, and certainly larger than the intellects of these cretins.

“Its a well known fact that planes blow up into nothing on
impact.” they state with pompous certainty. “Watch any Bruce
Willis movie.”

“Care to provide any documented examples? If it’s a well known
fact, then presumably this well known fact springs from some kind of
documentation—other than Bruce Willis movies?”

At this point the mad but cunning eyes of the conspiracy theorist will
narrow as they sense the corner that they have backed themselves into,
and plan their escape by means of another stunning backflip.

“Ah, but planes have never crashed into buildings before, so
there’s no way of telling.” they counter with a sly grin.

Well, actually planes have crashed into buildings before and since,
and not vapourized into nothing.

“But not big planes, with that much fuel,” they shriek in
hysterical denial.

Or that much metal to vapourize.

“Yes but not hijacked planes!”

“Are you suggesting that whether the crash is deliberate or
accidental affects the combustion qualities of the fuel?”

“Now you’re just being silly”.

Although collisions with buildings are rare, planes frequently crash
into mountains, streets, other aircraft, nosedive into the ground,or
have bombs planted aboard them, and don’t vapourize into
nothing. What’s so special about a tower that’s mostly
glass? But by now, the conspiracy theorist has once again sailed
happily around the fruit loop. “Its a well documented fact that
planes explode into nothing on impact.”

Effortlessly weaving back and forth between the position that its a
“well known fact” and that “its never happened before, so we
have nothing to compare it to”, the conspiracy theorist has now
convinced themselves ( if not too many other people) that the WTC
plane was not loaded with explosives, and that the instant
vapourization of the plane in a massive fireball was the same as any
other plane crash you might care to mention.

Round and round the fruit. loop...

But the hurdles which confront the conspiracy theorist are many, and
they are now forced to implement even more creative uses for the newly
discovered shockingly destructive qualities of kerosine. They have to
explain how the Arabs also engineered the elegant veritcal collapse of
both the WTC towers, and for this awkward fact the easiest counter is
to simply deny that it was a controlled demolition, and claim that the
buildings collapsed from fire caused by the burning kerosine.

For this, its necessary to sweep aside the second law of
thermodynamics and propose kerosine which is not only impossibly
destructive, but also recycles itself for a second burning in
violation of the law of degradation of energy. You see, it not only
consumed itself in a sudden catastrophic fireball , vapourizing a 65
ton plane into nothing, but then came back for a second go, burning at
2000C for another hour at the impact point, melting the
skyscraper’s steel like butter. And while it was doing all this
it also poured down the elevator shafts, starting fires all through
the building.

When I was at school there was a little thing called the entropy law
which suggests that a given portion of fuel can only burn once,
something which is readily observable in the real world, even for
those who didn’t make it to junior high school science. But this
is no problem for the conspiracy theorist. Gleefully, they claim that
a few thousand gallons of kerosine is enough to : completely vapourize
a 65 ton aircraft : have enough left over to burn ferociously enough
for over an hour at the impact point to melt steel ( melting point
about double the maximum combustion temperature of the fuel ) : still
have enough left over to pour down the elevator shafts and start
similarly destructive fires all through the building.

This kerosine really is remarkable stuff! How chilling to realize that
those kerosine heaters we had in the house when I was a kid were
deadly bombs, just waiting to go off. One false move and the entire
street might have been vapourized. And never again will I take
kerosine lamps out camping. One moment you’re there innocently
holding the lamp—the next—kapow!

Vapourized into nothing along with with the rest of the camp site, and
still leaving enough of the deadly stuff to start a massive forest
fire.

These whackos are actually claiming that the raging inferno allegedly
created by the miraculously recycling, and impossibly hot burning
kerosine melted or at least softened the steel supports of the
skyscraper.

Oblivious to the fact that the smoke coming from the WTC was black,
which indicates an oxygen starved fire -therefore, not particularly
hot, they trumpet an alleged temperature in the building of 2000 C ,
without a shred of evidence to support this curious suspension of the
laws of physics.

Not content with this ludicrous garbage, they then contend that as the
steel frames softened, they came straight down instead of buckling and
twisting and falling sideways.

Since they’re already re-engineered the combustion qualities of
jet fuel, violated the second law of thermodynamics, and re-defined
the structural properties of steel, why let a little thing like the
laws of gravity get in the way?

The tower fell in a time almost identical to that of a free falling
object, dropped from that height, meaning that its physically
impossible for it to have collapsed by the method of the top floors
smashing through the lower floors. But according to the conspiracy
theorists, the laws of gravity were temporarily suspended on the
morning of Sept 11. It appears that the evil psychic power of those
dreadful Arabs knew no bounds. Even after they were dead, they were
able, by the power of their evil spirits, to force down the tower at a
speed physically impossible under the laws of gravity, had it been
meeting any resistance from fireproofed steel structures originally
designed to resist many tons of hurricane force wind as well as the
impact of a Boeing passenger jet straying off course.

Clearly, these conspiracy nuts never did their science homework at
school, but did become extremely adept at inventing tall tales for
why.

“Muslim terrorists stole my notes, sir”

“No miss, the kerosine heater blew up and vapourized everything in
the street, except for my passport.”

“You see sir, the schoolbus was hijacked by Arabs who destroyed my
homework because they hate our freedoms.”

Or perhaps they misunderstood the term “creative science” and
mistakenly thought that coming up with such rubbish was in fact, their
science homework.

The ferocious heat generated by this ghastly kerosine was, according
to the conspiracy theorists, the reason why so many of the WTC victims
can’t be identified. DNA is destroyed by heat. (Although 2000 C
isn’t really required, 100C will generally do the job.) This is
quite remarkable, because according to the conspiracy theorist, the
nature of DNA suddenly changes if you go to a different city.

That’s right! If you are killed by an Arab terrorist in NY, your
DNA will be destroyed by such temperatures. But if you are killed by
an Arab terrorist in Washington DC, your DNA will be so robust that it
can survive temperatures which completely vapourize a 65 ton aircraft.

You see, these loonies have somehow concocted the idea that the
missile which hit the pentagon was not a missile at all, but one of
the hijacked planes. And to prove this unlikely premise, they point to
a propaganda statement from the Bush regime, which rather stupidly
claims that all but one of the people aboard the plane were identified
from the site by DNA testing, even though nothing remains of the
plane. The plane was vapourized by the fuel tank explosion maintain
these space loonies, but the people inside it were all but one
identified by DNA testing.

So there we have it. The qualities of DNA are different, depending
upon which city you’re in, or perhaps depending upon which fairy
story you’re trying to sell at any particular time.

This concoction about one of the hijacked planes hitting the Pentagon
really is a howler. For those not familiar with the layout of the
Pentagon, it consists of 5 rings of building, each with a space
inbetween. Each ring of building is about 30 to 35 ft deep, with a
similar amount of open space between it and the next ring. The object
which penetrated the Pentagon went in at about a 45 degree angle,
punching a neat circular hole of about a 12 ft diameter through three
rings ( six walls).A little later a section of wall about 65 ft wide
collapsed in the outer ring. Since the plane which the conspiracy
theorists claim to be responsible for the impact had a wing span of
125 ft and a length of 155 ft, and there was no wreckage of the plane,
either inside or outside the building, and the lawns outside were
still smooth and green enough to play golf on, this crazy delusion is
clearly physically impossible.

But hey, we’ve already disregarded the combustion qualities of
jet fuel, the normal properties of common building materials, the
properties of DNA, the laws of gravity and the second law of
thermodynamics, so what the hell—why not throw in a little
spatial impossibility as well ? I would have thought that the
observation that a solid object cannot pass through another solid
object without leaving a hole at least as big as itself is reasonably
sound science. But to the conspiracy theorist, this is “mumbo
jumbo”. It conflicts with the delusion that they’re hooked
on, so it “must be wrong” although trying to get them to explain
exactly how it could be wrong is a futile endeavour.

Conspiracy theorists fly into a curious panic whenever the Pentagon
missile is mentioned.They nervously maintain that the plane was
vapourized by it’s exploding fuel load and point to the WTC
crash as evidence of this behavior.

(That’s a wonderful fruit loop.) Like an insect which has just
been sprayed, running back and forth in its last mad death throes,
they first argue that the reason the hole is so small is that the
plane never entered the wall, having blown up outside, and then
suddenly backflip to explain the 250 ft deep missile hole by saying
that the plane disappeared all the way into the building, and then
blew up inside the building (even though the building shows no sign of
such damage). As for what happened to the wings—here’s
where they get really creative. The wings snapped off and folded into
the fuselage which then carried them into the building, which then
closed up behind the plane like a piece of meat.

When it suits them, they'll also claim that the plane slid in on
its belly, (ignoring the undamaged lawn) while at the same time citing
alleged witnesses to the plane diving steeply into the building from
an “irrecoverable angle.” How they reconcile these two scenarios
as being compatible is truly a study in stupidity.

Once they get desperate enough, you can be sure that the UFO
conspiracy stuff will make an appearance. The Arabs are in league with
the Martians.

Space aliens snatched the remains of the Pentagon plane and fixed most
of the hole in the wall, just to confuse people. They gave the Arabs
invisibility pills to help get them onto the planes. Little green men
were seen talking to Bin Laden a few weeks prior to the attacks.

As the nation gears up to impeach the traitor Bush, and stop his
perpetual oil war, it's not helpful to have these idiots
distracting from the process by spreading silly conspiracy theories
about mythical Arabs, stories which do nothing but play into the hands
of the extremist Bush regime.

At a less serious time, we might tolerate such crackpots with amused
detachment, but they need to understand that the treachery that was
perpetrated on Sept 11, and the subsequent war crimes committed in
“retaliation” are far too serious for us to allow such frivolous
self-indulgence to go unchallenged.

Those who are truly addicted to conspiracy delusions should find a
more appropriate outlet for their paranoia.

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